Entities with substantial printing demands typically use a production printer. A production printer is a high-speed printer used for volume printing, such as a continuous-forms printer that prints on a web of print media stored on a large roll. A production printer typically includes a localized print controller that manages the overall operation of the printer, and a marking engine (sometimes referred to as an “imaging engine” or a “print engine”). The marking engine includes one or more arrays of printheads.
Upon receiving a print job, the print controller rasterizes logical pages of the job (e.g., to create bitmaps representing each page of the job), and the marking engine operates individual printheads to mark the web based on the rasterized logical pages. Thus, the printer marks physical pages based on the digital information of the print job.
Different print jobs may be defined in different color spaces. Each color space covers a predefined range of colors defined by Red, Green, and Blue colors (RGB), defined by Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Registration Black colors, (CMYK), or other coordinate systems. Some print jobs may be defined in complex color spaces that define millions or billions of colors, while other print jobs may be defined in less complex color spaces. If a printer is incapable of handling the full range of colors defined by a color space indicated by a print job, then a more advanced printer may be used, such as a proofing printer.
However, printers having advanced capabilities are more expensive to operate than other printers within a print shop. Thus, print shop operators continue to seek out techniques for reducing operating costs within the print shop when handling print jobs with complex color requirements.